The Social Sciences, EpistemicViolence, and the Problem of the

“Invention of the Other”

Santiago Castro-Gómez

During the last two decades of thetwentieth century, postmodern philosophy and cultural studies developedinto important theoretical currents that impelled a strong critique, insideand outside the academy, of the pathologies of Westernization. Their manydifferences notwithstanding, both currents attribute these pathologies to theexclusive, dualist character thatmodern power relations assume.Modernityis an alterity-generating machine that, in the name of reason and human-ism, excludes from its imaginary the hybridity, multiplicity, ambiguity, andcontingency of different forms of life. The current crisis ofmodernity is seenby postmodern philosophy and cultural studies as a historic opportunity forthese long-repressed differences to emerge.

I hope to showhere that the proclaimed “end” ofmodernity clearlyimplies the crisis of a power mechanism that constructs the “other” bymeans of a binary logic that represses difference. I also argue that this crisisdoes not imply the weakening of the global structure within which thismechanism operates. What I will refer to here as the “end of modernity” ismerely the crisis of a historical configuration of power in the framework ofthe capitalist world-system, which nevertheless has taken on other formsin times of globalization, without this implying the disappearance of thatworld-system. I argue that the present global reorganization of the capitalisteconomy depends on the production of differences. As a result, the celebra-tory affirmation of these differences, far from subverting the system, couldbe contributing to its consolidation. I defend the claim that the challengenow facing a critical theory of society is precisely to reveal what the crisis

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of the modern project consists of and to indicate the new configurations ofglobal power in what Jean-François Lyotard has called the “postmoderncondition.”

My strategy is first to interrogate the significance of what Jür-gen Habermas has called the “project of modernity,” seeking to demon-strate the origins of two closely linked social phenomena: the formation ofnation-states and the consolidation of colonialism. Here I emphasize therole played by techno-scientific knowledge, particularly knowledge thatemerges from the social sciences, in the consolidation of these phenomena.Later I show that the “end of modernity” cannot be understood as the resultof an explosion of normative frameworks in which this project taxonomi-cally operated, but, rather, as a new configuration of global power relationsthat is based on the production of differences instead of on their repression.I conclude with a brief reflection on the role of a critical theory of societyin times of globalization.

The Project of GovernmentabilityWhat do we mean when we speak of the “project of modernity”? Primarilyand generally, we refer to the Faustian drive to submit the entire world tothe absolute control of man under the steady guide of knowledge. TheGerman philosopher Hans Blumenberg (1973, pt. 2) has shown that, at aconceptual level, this project required humanity’s elevation to the rank ofprincipal organizer of all things. To attain this power, mankind must fight awar, one it will win only by knowing the enemy profoundly, deciphering itsmost intimate secrets, so that its own tools may be used to make it submitto human will. This is precisely the role of techno-scientific reason withrespect to nature. Ontological insecurity can only be eliminated insofaras we increase our mechanisms of control over the magical or mysteriousforces of nature, especially over those aspects of it that cannot be reducedto calculability. In this sense, Max Weber speaks of the rationalization ofthe West as the process of “disenchanting” the world.

Whenwe speak ofmodernity as a “project,”we are also principallyreferring to the existence of a central instance from which the mechanismsof control over the natural and social world are distributed and coordinated.This primary instance is the state, guarantor of the rational organization ofhuman life. In this context, “rational organization”means that the processesof disenchantment and demagicalization of the world to which Weber andBlumenberg refer have begun to be regulated by the state’s guiding hand.The state is understood as the sphere in which all societal interests reach

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a point of “synthesis,” that is, the locus which formulates collective goalsvalid for everyone. This requires the application of “rational criteria” thatpermit the state to channel the desires, interests, and emotions of citizenstoward its own goals. The modern state thus not only acquires a monopolyon violence, but also uses it to rationally “direct” the activities of its citizensin accordance with previously established scientific criteria.

The U.S. sociologist Immanuel Wallerstein (1991) has shown howthe social sciences became a fundamental part of this project of organizationand control over human life. The birth of the social sciences was not anadditive phenomenon to the framework of political organization definedby the nation-state, it was constitutive of that framework. In order to governthe social world, one first had to generate a platform from which it could bescientifically observed.1 Without the aid of the social sciences, the modernstate would not be in a position to exercise control over people’s lives,define long- and short-term collective goals, or construct and assign to itscitizens a cultural “identity.”2 The restructuring of the economy accordingto the new demands of international capitalism, the redefinition of politicallegitimacy, and even the identification of the specific character and valuesof each nation all required a scientifically endorsed representation of howsocial reality “functioned.” Governmental programs could only be realizedand executed on the basis of this information.

The taxonomies elaborated by the social sciences were thus notlimited to the development of an abstract system of rules called “science”—as the founding fathers of sociology ideologically believed. Instead, thesetaxonomies had practical consequences, for they legitimized the regulativepolitics of the state. The practical matrix that led to the rise of the socialsciences was the need to “adjust” human life to the apparatus of production.The social sciences teach us which “laws” govern economy, society, politics,and history. For its own part, the state defines its governmental politics onthe basis of this scientifically legitimized normativity.

Now, this attempt to establish profiles of subjectivity coordinatedby the state entails a phenomenon that I call here the “invention of theother.” By “invention,” I do not mean simply the way in which a certaingroup of people abstractly represents itself to others; rather, I refer to themechanisms of power/knowledge from which those representations areconstructed. The problem of the “other” must be approached theoreticallynot so much as the “concealment” of a preexisting cultural identity as froma perspective that takes into account the process of material and symbolicproduction that modern societies have been involved in since the beginning

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of the sixteenth century.3 I would like to illustrate this point by turning tothe work of the Venezuelan thinker Beatriz González Stephan, who hasstudied the disciplinary mechanisms of power in the context of nineteenth-century Latin America and the ways in which these constructions madepossible the “invention of the other.”

González Stephan identifies three disciplinary practices thathelped shape Latin American citizenship in the nineteenth century: consti-tutions, manuals of etiquette [urbanidad], and grammar manuals. Follow-ing the Uruguayan theorist Angel Rama, González Stephan observes thatthese technologies of subjectification had a common denominator: theirlegitimacy lay in writing. In the nineteenth century, writing was an exercisethat met the need to organize and institute the logic of “civilization.” Itanticipated the modernizing dream of the Creole elites. The written wordconstructed laws and national identities, designed modernizing programs,and organized the understanding of the world in terms of inclusion and ex-clusion. For this reason, nations’ foundational projects were carried out bycreating institutions legitimized by writing (schools, hospices, workshops,prisons) and hegemonic discourses (maps, grammars, constitutions, manu-als, treatises on hygiene) that regulated public conduct. These institutionsand texts established boundaries between people and assured them thatthey existed either inside or outside of the limits defined by written legality(González Stephan 1996).

The formation of the citizen as a “subject of law” is only possiblewithin the limits of the disciplinary structure and, in this case, within thespace of legality defined by the constitution. The juridico-political functionof constitutions is precisely to invent citizenship, in other words, to createa field of homogenous identities that make the modern project of gov-ernmentability viable. For example, the Venezuelan constitution of 1839declares that the only people eligible for citizenship are married males whoare older than twenty-five, literate, own property, and practice a professionearning them no less than four hundred pesos a year (ibid., 32). The acqui-sition of citizenship is thus a sieve through which only those subjects whofit the profile required for the project of modernity may pass: ones who aremale, white, head of household, Catholic, landowner, literate, and hetero-sexual. Those who do not meet these requirements (women, servants, theinsane, the illiterate, blacks, heretics, slaves, Indians, homosexuals, dissi-dents) are excluded from the “lettered city,” sealed off in a field of illegality,and subject to punishment and therapy by the same laws that exclude them.

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But if the constitution formally defines a desirable type of modernsubjectivity, pedagogy is the great artisan of its materialization. Schoolsbecome a space of enclosure that forms the type of subject called for bythe constitution’s “regulative ideals.” The purpose is to impose a disciplineon the mind and body that enables people to be “useful to the fatherland.”Children’s behavior must be regulated and monitored, compelling them toacquire knowledge, abilities, habits, values, cultural models, and lifestylesthat will allow them to assume a “productive” role in society. GonzálezStephan does not direct her attention to the school as an “institution ofseclusion,” however, but rather toward the disciplinary function of cer-tain pedagogical technologies such as manuals of etiquette, especially thefamous one published by Manuel Antonio Carreño (1854). The manualoperates within the field of authority laid out by the book, with the pur-pose of ordering the subordination of human instinct, the control over thebody, and the domestication of any kind of sensibility considered “barbaric”(González Stephan 1995). No manuals were written on how to be a goodpeasant, a good Indian, a good black person, or a good gaucho, since all ofthese human types were seen as barbaric. Instead, manuals were written onhow to be a “good citizen” so as to become part of the civitas, the legal spaceinhabited by the epistemological, moral, and aesthetic subjects that moder-nity requires. For this reason, the Carreño manual warns that “without theobservation of these rules, more or less perfect according to the degree ofcivilization in each country[,] . . . therewill be noway to cultivate sociability,which is the principle of communities’ conservation and progress and of allwell-ordered societies’ existence” (quoted in ibid., 436; González Stephan’semphasis).

Themanuals of etiquette became a new bible that would teach cit-izens proper behavior in the most diverse situations of life, for each person’sdegree of success in the civitas terrena, or the material reign of civilization,depended on his or her faithful obedience of norms. “Entrance” into thebanquet ofmodernity required compliancewith the normative prescriptionthat distinguished members of the new Latin American urban class thatbegan to emerge during the second half of the nineteenth century. The “we”that the etiquette manuals refer to, then, is the same class of bourgeois cit-izens whom the republican constitutions address: citizens who know howto speak, eat, use silverware, blow their nose, deal with servants, and behavethemselves in society. These subjects are perfectly familiar with “the theaterof etiquette, the rigidity of appearance, the mask of contention” (GonzálezStephan 1995, 439). In this sense, González Stephan’s observations agree

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with those of Max Weber and Norbert Elias, for whom the formation ofthe modern subject went hand in hand with the requirement of self-controland the repression of instincts, the goal being to make social differencemore visible. The “process of civilization” implies an increase of the thresh-old of shame, for it was necessary to clearly distinguish oneself from all ofthe social classes that did not pertain to the arena of civitas which LatinAmerican intellectuals like Domingo Faustino Sarmiento identified as theparadigm of modernity. “Civility” and “civic education” thus operated aspedagogical taxonomies that separated dress coats from ponchos, neatnessfrom filth, the capital from the provinces, the republic from the colony,civilization from barbarism.

Within this taxonomic process, grammar manuals also played afoundational role. In particular, González Stephan mentions Andrés Bello’sGramática de la lengua castellana destinada al uso de los americanos [Gram-mar of the Castilian language destined for American use] published in1847. The project of the construction of the nation required the stabiliza-tion of language so that laws could be properly implemented and commer-cial transactions facilitated. A direct relationship exists, therefore, betweenlanguage and citizenship, between grammar manuals and manuals of eti-quette: the purpose in all of these cases is to create the Homo economicus, orthe patriarchal subject charged with promoting and carrying out the mod-ernization of the republic. From the normativity of the written word, theLatin American grammar manuals sought to establish a culture of “buendecir” (formal speech) so as to avoid “the vices of popular speech” and thecoarse barbarisms of the masses (González Stephan 1996, 29). We are thusfaced with a disciplinary practice that reflects the contradictions that wouldeventually tear apart the project of modernity: establishing the conditionsfor “liberty” and “order” implies the subjection of instincts, the suppressionof spontaneity, and the control over differences. To be civilized, to enterinto modernity, to become Colombian, Brazilian, or Venezuelan citizens,individuals not only had to behave properly and know how to read andwrite, but they also had to make their language fit a series of norms. Thesubmission to order and the norm leads the individual to substitute theheterogeneous, spontaneous vital flow for a continuum that is arbitrarilyconstituted from the written word.

It is thus clear that the two processes indicated by GonzálezStephan, the invention of citizenship and the invention of the other, aregenetically related. The creation of the modern citizen in Latin Amer-ica entailed the generation of a reverse image from which this identity

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could assess and affirm itself as such. The construction of the imaginaryof “civilization” required the production of its counterpart: the imaginaryof “barbarism.” In both cases, more is at stake than just abstract repre-sentation. These imaginaries have a concrete materiality, in the sense thatthey are bound to abstract systems of disciplinary nature such as schools,law, the state, prisons, hospitals, and the social sciences. It is precisely thislink between knowledge and discipline that permits us to speak, followingGayatri Chakravorty Spivak, of the project of modernity as an exercise in“epistemic violence.”

Although González Stephan indicates that all of these disciplinarymechanisms strove to create the profile ofHomo economicus in LatinAmer-ica, her genealogical analysis, inspired by the microphysics of power ana-lyzed by Michel Foucault, does not permit an understanding of how theseprocesses are linked to the dynamic of capitalism’s constitution as world-system. In order to conceptualize this problem, a methodological turn isnecessary: the genealogy of power-knowledge, as developed by Foucault,must be broadened into the sphere of longue durée macrostructures (as ana-lyzed by Fernand Braudel and Immanuel Wallerstein) so we can visualizethe problem of the “invention of the other” from a geopolitical perspective.To this end, it would be useful to examine how postcolonial theories haveapproached this problem.

The Coloniality of Power, or, the “Other Face” of ModernityOne of the most important contributions of postcolonial theories to thecurrent restructuring of the social sciences is their demonstration that therise of nation-states in Europe and the Americas from the seventeenth tothe nineteenth centuries was not an autonomous process, but rather onewith a structural counterpart: the consolidation of European colonialismabroad. The social sciences’ persistent negation of this link between moder-nity and colonialism has been one of the clearest signs of their conceptuallimitations. Permeated from the beginningwith a European imaginary, thesocial sciences projected the idea of an aseptic and self-generating Europe,historically formedwithout any contactwith other cultures (see Blaut 1993).Rationalization—in a Weberian sense—would thus have resulted from theattribution of qualities inherent to Western societies (the “passage” fromtradition to modernity) and not from Europe’s colonial interaction withAmerica, Asia, and Africa since 1492.4 From this perspective, the experi-ence of colonialism seems to be completely irrelevant to an understandingof the phenomenon of modernity and the rise of the social sciences. For

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Africans, Asians, and Latin Americans, this means that colonialism didnot primarily represent destruction and plunder but, above all, the start ofthe tortuous, inevitable road to development and modernization. This isthe colonial imaginary that traditionally has been reproduced by the socialsciences and by philosophy on both sides of the Atlantic.

Nevertheless, postcolonial theories have shown that any inventoryof modernity which does not take into account the impact of the colonialexperience on the formation of properly modern power relations is not onlyincomplete, but also ideological. For this type of disciplinary power, which,according to Foucault, characterizes societies and modern institutions, wasgenerated precisely at the center of a web of power/knowledge marked bycoloniality. Coloniality should not be confused with colonialism. While colo-nialism refers to a historical period (which, in the case of Latin America,ended in 1824), coloniality references a technology of power that persiststoday, founded on the “knowledge of the other.” Coloniality is not moder-nity’s “past” but its “other face.” The category of “coloniality of power,”suggested by Peruvian sociologist Aníbal Quijano (1999), refers preciselyto this situation.

In Quijano’s opinion, colonial depredation is legitimized by animaginary that establishes incommensurable differences between the col-onizer and the colonized. Here, notions of “race” and “culture” operateas a taxonomic construction that generates opposing identities. The col-onized thus appears as the “other of reason,” which justifies the use ofdisciplinary power by the colonizer. Wickedness, barbarism, and inconti-nence are “identitarian” markers of the colonized, while goodness, civi-lization, and rationality pertain to the colonizer. Both identities are relatedthrough exteriority and are mutually exclusive. Any communication be-tween them cannot take place in the sphere of culture—since their codesare incommensurable—but only in the sphere of the Realpolitik dictated bycolonial power. A “just” politics would be one that, through the implemen-tation of juridical and disciplinary mechanisms, attempts to “normalize”the other by completely Westernizing him or her.

The concept of the “coloniality of power” broadens and correctsthe Foucauldian concept of “disciplinary power” by demonstrating thatthe panoptic constructions erected by the modern state are inscribed in awider structure of power/knowledge. This global structure is configuredby the colonial relation between center and periphery that is at the rootof European expansion. As Enrique Dussel has shown, this structure iscreated during the “first modernity,” which corresponds to the hegemony

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of Spain over the Atlantic circuit (see Dussel’s contribution to this issue ofNepantla). The concept of disciplinary power Foucault works with refers tothe “second modernity,” or the period of state biopolitics in the eighteenthand nineteenth centuries, and can be understood as a “modality” of thecoloniality of power.

We can thus state that modernity is a project of governing thesocial world which emerged in the sixteenth century. Its constructions ofpower/knowledge are anchored in a double coloniality: one directed inwardby European and American nation-states in their effort to establish ho-mogenous identities through politics of subjectification, the other directedoutward by the hegemonic powers of the modern/colonial world-system intheir attempt to ensure the flow of primary materials from the peripheryto the center. Both processes are part of the same structural dynamic.

My thesis is that the social sciences developed in this space of mod-ern/colonial power and in the ideological knowledges it generated. Fromthis perspective, the social sciences did not produce an “epistemologicalrupture” (in an Althusserian sense) with respect to ideology. Instead, thecolonial imaginary permeated the entire conceptual system of the socialsciences from their inception.5 In this sense, the majority of seventeenth-and eighteenth-century social theorists (Hobbes, Bossuet, Turgot, Con-dorcet) agreed that the “human species” slowly emerged from ignoranceand crossed different “stages” of perfection until finally reaching the “com-ing of age” that modern European societies had achieved (see Meek 1981).The empirical referent employed by this heuristic model to define the first“stage,” the lowest on the scale of human development, is that of Americanindigenous societies as described by European travelers, chroniclers, andnavigators since the sixteenth century. The characteristics of this first stageare savagery, barbarism, and the total absence of art, science, and writing.“In the beginning all was America,” that is, all was superstition, primi-tivism, the struggle of all against all, the “state of nature.” The final stageof human progress, already achieved by European societies, is constructedinstead as the absolute “other” of the first and as its reverse image. In thisstage reign civility, the state of law, the cultivation of science, and the arts.Here, man has reached a state of “enlightenment” in which, according toKant, he is capable of self-government and the autonomous use of reason.Europe has blazed the path to civilization that all nations of the planet musttake.

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It is not difficult to see how the conceptual apparatus that emergedwith the social sciences in the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries is sus-tained by a colonial imaginary of ideological character. Binary conceptslike barbarism and civilization, tradition and modernity, community andsociety, science and myth, infancy and maturity, organic solidarity and me-chanical solidarity, and poverty and development, amongmany others, havefully permeated the analytic models of the social sciences. The imaginary ofprogress, according to which all societies evolve in time following universallaws inherent to nature or the human spirit, appears as an ideological prod-uct constructed from the mechanism of modern/colonial power. The socialsciences function structurally as an “ideological apparatus” that internallysanctioned the exclusion and disciplining of those who did not conform tothe profiles of subjectivity that the state needed to implement its politics ofmodernization. Externally, the social sciences legitimized the internationaldivision of labor and the inequality of the terms of interchange and com-merce between the center and the periphery, that is, the enormous socialand economic benefits that European powers obtained through domina-tion of their colonies. The production of alterity within and the productionof alterity without were part of the same construct of power. Colonialityof power and coloniality of knowledge were situated in the same geneticmatrix.

From Disciplinary Power to Libidinal PowerI would like to conclude this essay by analyzing the transformations capi-talism undergoes once the end of the project of modernity is consolidated,and the consequences these transformations may have on the social sciencesand a critical theory of society.

I have conceptualized modernity as a series of practices orientedtoward the rational control of human life. Among these practices are theinstitutionalization of the social sciences, the capitalist organization of theeconomy, the colonial expansion of Europe, and, above all, the juridico-territorial configuration of nation-states. We have also seen that modernityis a “project” because the rational control over human life is exercised fromwithin and without through a primary instance, which is the nation-state.But what do we refer to when we speak of the end of the project of moder-nity? We can begin by responding in the following manner: Modernity nolonger operates as a “project” insofar as the social is configured by instancesthat escape the control of the nation-state. Or, in other words, the projectof modernity reaches its “end” when the nation-state loses the capacity to

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organize people’s social and material lives. It is then that we may properlyspeak of globalization.

Although the project of modernity always had a tendency towardthe “worldness” (Mignolo 2000) of human action, I believe that what todayis called “globalization” is a sui generis phenomenon, since it brings withit a qualitative change in the global mechanisms of power. I would liketo illustrate the difference between modernity and globalization using theconcepts of embedding and disembedding developed by Anthony Giddens:while modernity disembeds social relations from their traditional contextsand reembeds them in posttraditional spheres of action coordinated by thestate, globalization disembeds social relations from their national contextsand reembeds them in postmodern spheres of action that are no longercoordinated by any particular instance.

From this perspective, I maintain that globalization is not a “proj-ect,” because governmentability no longer needs an “Archimedian point,”that is, a central instance that regulates the mechanisms of social control.6

We can even speak of a “governmentability without government” to indi-cate the spectral, nebulous character, at times imperceptible but effective forthis very reason, that power assumes in times of globalization. Subjectionto the world-system is no longer assured through the control over time andbody exercised by institutions like factories or schools but, rather, by theproduction of symbolic property and its irresistible seduction of the con-sumer’s imaginary. The libidinal power of postmodernity attempts to shapeindividuals’ total psychology in such a way that each may reflexively con-struct his or her own subjectivity without having to oppose the system. Onthe contrary, the system itself offers the resources that permit the differentialconstruction of the Selbst. Whatever lifestyle one chooses, whatever projectof self-invention or act of autobiographical writing, there is always an offeron the market and an “expert system” that guarantees its trustworthiness.7

Far from repressing differences, as did the disciplinary power of modernity,the libidinal power of postmodernity stimulates and produces them.

We have also noted that within the framework of the modernproject, the social sciences basically functioned as alterity-producing mech-anisms. This was due to the fact that the accumulation of capital requiredthe creation of a “subject” profile that would easily adapt to the demands ofproduction: white, male, married, heterosexual, disciplined, hardworking,self-controlled. As Foucault has shown, human sciences contributed to thecreation of this profile insofar as their object of knowledge was constructedthrough institutional practices of confinement and sequestration. Prisons,

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hospitals, asylums, schools, factories, and colonial societies were laborato-ries from which the social sciences recovered, through its reverse image, theideal of “man” that would impel and sustain the processes of capital’s accu-mulation. This image of “rational man” was obtained counterfactually, bystudying the “others of reason”: the insane, Indians, blacks, social misfits,prisoners, homosexuals, the poor. To construct the profile of subjectivityrequired by the modern project, therefore, all these differences had to besuppressed.

Nevertheless, if my argument up to this point is plausible, in themoment at which the accumulation of capital no longer demands the sup-pression but rather the production of differences, the structural link betweenthe social sciences and the new mechanisms of power should also change.The social sciences and humanities must undergo a “paradigm shift” allow-ing them to adjust to the systemic requirements of global capital. The caseof Lyotard seems to me symptomatic. He lucidly affirms that the meta-narrative of the humanization of humanity has entered into crisis, but hesimultaneously proclaims the birth of a new legitimizing narrative: thecoexistence of different “language games.” Each language game defines itsown rules, which no longer need to be sanctioned by a higher court ofreason. Neither Descartes’s epistemological hero nor Kant’s moral herocontinues to function as a transcendental instance that defines the universalrules by which all players should play, irrespective of the diversity of thegames in which they participate. For Lyotard, in the “postmodern condi-tion” it is the players themselves who construct the rules of the game theywish to play in. There are no previously defined rules (Lyotard 1990 [1979]).

The problem with Lyotard is not that he has announced the endof a project that, in Habermas’s (1990, 32–54) opinion, is still “inconclu-sive.” Instead, the problem stems from the new narrative that Lyotardproposes. To affirm that previously defined rules no longer exist is to ren-der invisible—that is, tomask—theworld-system that produces differencesbased on rules defined for all of the globe’s players. Let me be clear: thedeath of the world-system’s metanarratives of legitimation does not meanthe death of the world-system itself! Rather, it entails a change in the powerrelations within the world-system, which generates new narratives of legiti-mation such as the one proposed by Lyotard. The strategy of legitimation isdifferent, however: no longer a set of metanarratives that reveal the system,ideologically projecting it onto an epistemological, historical, and moralmacrosubject, it consists, rather, of micronarratives that leave the systemoutside of representation; that is, they make it invisible.

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Something similar occurs within so-called cultural studies, one ofthe most innovative paradigms in the humanities and social sciences to-ward the close of the twentieth century.8 Of course, cultural studies havecontributed to the loosening of disciplinary boundaries whose rigidity wasconverting our departments of social sciences and humanities into a hand-ful of incommensurable “epistemological fiefdoms.” The transdisciplinaryvocation of cultural studies has been extremely healthy for some academicinstitutions that, in Latin America at least, had become accustomed to“guarding and administering” the canon of every discipline.9 It is in thiscontext that the Gulbenkian Commission report shows how cultural stud-ies have begun to build bridges between the three great islands amongwhich modernity distributed scientific knowledge (Wallerstein et al. 1996,64–66).

Nevertheless, the problem lies not so much in the inscription ofcultural studies into the university sphere, nor even in the type of theoreticalquestions cultural studies provoke or the methodologies they utilize, as intheir use of these methodologies and in their responses to these questions. Itis evident, for example, that the spread of the culture industry throughoutthe world has called into question the separation between high and lowculture, which thinkers from the “critical” tradition like Max Horkheimerand Theodor Adorno were still bound to, as were our great Latin Amer-ican “men of letters,” with their conservative, elitist tradition. But withinthis interchange between high culture and popular culture enabled by themass media, within the planetary negotiation of symbolic property, cul-tural studies have seemed to see only a liberating explosion of differences.Urban mass culture and the new forms of social perception generated byinformation technologies are viewed as spaces of democratic emancipation,and even as a locus of hybridization and resistance before the imperativesof the market. Faced with this diagnostic, one begins to wonder if culturalstudies have mortgaged their critical potential to the commodity fetishismof symbolic property.

As in Lyotard’s case, the world-system remains the great absentobject in the representation offered us by cultural studies. It is as if merelynaming “totality” had become taboo for contemporary social sciences andphilosophy, just as in Judaism it was a sin to name or represent God. The“permitted” topics—which today enjoy academic prestige—are the frag-mentation of the subject, the hybridization of life-forms, the articulationof differences, and the disenchantment with metanarratives. The use ofcategories like “class,” “periphery,” or “world-system,” which propose to

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encompass heuristically a multiplicity of specific situations of gender, eth-nicity, race, background, or sexual orientation, marks one as “essentialist,”as behaving in a “politically incorrect” manner, or at least as having fallenunder the spell ofmetanarratives. These reproaches are sometimes justified,but perhaps there is an alternative.

I consider that the great challenge for the social sciences consistsin learning how to name totality (with its persistent colonial face) withoutfalling into the essentialism and universalism of metanarratives. The taskof a critical theory of society is, then, to make visible the new mechanismsof colonial production of differences in times of globalization. In the LatinAmerican case, the major challenge is to “decolonize” the social sciencesand philosophy. Although this is not a new agenda for us, our goal today isto disengage ourselves from a whole series of binary categories (colonizerversus colonized, center versus periphery, Europe versus Latin America,development versus underdevelopment, oppressor versus oppressed, etc.)that dependency theories and liberation philosophies worked with in thepast. We must understand that it is no longer possible to conceptualize newconfigurations of power using this theoretical tool.10 From this perspective,the new agendas of postcolonial studies could revitalize the tradition ofcritical theory in our field (Castro-Gómez, Guardiola-Rivera, and Millánde Benavides 1999).

Translated by

Desirée A. Martín

Notes1. As Anthony Giddens demonstrates clearly, the social sciences are “reflexive systems,”

since their function is to observe the social world within which they them-

selves are produced. See Giddens 1999 [1991], 23.

2. I have addressed the problem of cultural identity as a construct of the state in Castro-

Gómez 1999.

3. For this reason, I prefer to use the category “invention” instead of Argentine philoso-

pher Enrique Dussel (1992)’s “encubrimiento” (covering over or concealing).

4. Recall thatMaxWeberwonders, at the beginning ofThe Protestant Ethic (1992 [1904],

13), by “what combination of circumstances the fact should be attributed that

in Western civilization, and in Western civilization only, cultural phenomena

have appeared which (as we like to think) lie in a line of development having

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universal significance and value.” This question guides his entire theory of

rationalization.

5. A genealogy of the social sciences should show that the ideological imaginary that

penetrated the social sciences originated in the first phase of consolidation

of the modern/colonial world-system, that is, in the period of Spanish hege-

mony.

6. The materiality of globalization is no longer constituted by the disciplinary institu-

tions of the nation-state, but rather by corporations that recognize neither

territories nor borders. This implies the configuration of a new framework

of legality, that is, a new form of the exercise of power and authority, such

as the production of new punitive mechanisms (a global police) that would

guarantee the accumulation of capital and the resolution of conflicts. The

wars in the Persian Gulf and Kosovo are good examples of the “new world

order” emerging after the Cold War and as a consequence of the “end” of

the project of modernity. See Hardt and Negri 2000; and Castro-Gómez and

Mendieta 1998.

7. I take the concept of “trust” deposited in expert systems from Giddens (1999 [1991],

84).

8. For an introduction to Anglo-Saxon cultural studies, see Agger 1992. For the case

of cultural studies in Latin America, the best introduction is still Rowe and

Schelling 1993 [1991].

9. Here we need to understand the different political significance that cultural studies

have had inNorthAmerican andLatinAmerican universities.While cultural

studies in the United States have become a convenient vehicle for rapid

academic “careerism” in a structurally flexible atmosphere, in Latin America

they have served to combat the frustrating ossification and parochialism of

university structures.

10. For a critique of the binary categories that Latin American thinking engaged with

during the twentieth century, see Castro-Gómez 1996.

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